By MICHAEL ROSENBERG

Detroit Free Press Columnist

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Life was better in the old days, unless you happen to be black, Hispanic, gay, female, an Internet user or in need of a heart transplant. Then, not so much.

Nonetheless, the desire to romanticize the past is an essential part of American living. We like rooms with exposed beams and the manual scoreboard at Wrigley Field. And most of us are already in love with a Steelers-Packers Super Bowl -- even if you hate one of those teams.

The Packers are American royalty, thanks largely to the work of Vince Lombardi (no longer with us) and Brett Favre (no longer with them). The Steelers are probably considered the toughest team in the NFL, not just for how they play but for what they represent. The Packers and Steelers are two of the rare pro sports franchises who really mean something to the culture. They don't seem like hired guns who are here to fill luxury suites.

So much of this is in our imaginations (how can anybody definitively say the Steelers are really tougher than the Ravens or Patriots?), but I am buying in completely. I am more fired up for this Super Bowl than I could possibly be for a Jaguars-Panthers Super Bowl, even if the Jaguars and Panthers were both undefeated and you promised me there were no stupid light beer commercials (which means: no light beer commercials).

Packers-Steelers is different. We know how much the fan bases care. Dozens of babies in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin will be named after the Super Bowl hero, which means those babies are lucky that the Steelers lost center Maurkice Pouncey to injury (even though I feel for Pouncey).

The hitting will seem harder in this game than it did when the Colts played the Saints last year. The players will seem more intense. And this will make us love it more. For all the talk about concussions and the physical decay of retired NFL players in recent years, most football fans live in a happy state of denial: The games bring us real-life versions of the cartoon violence we get in movies, television and music, and we don't want to hear about the consequences.

And speaking of which: As you have surely heard by now, Bears quarterback Jay Cutler got ripped by all sorts of people Sunday for leaving the NFC title game with a knee injury of undetermined nature. Fans saw him standing on the sidelines and were appalled.

Cutler couldn't win a popularity contest in an empty room, so it was not shocking that prominent NFL players like Deion Sanders and Derrick Brooks piled on. Still, though: Deion Sanders? Sanders was a Hall of Fame cornerback, a joy to watch and popular with his teammates. But as I recall, he made approximately nine tackles in his entire career. He was FAMOUS for avoiding contact.

As it turns out, Cutler has a tear in his medial collateral ligament. I am quite sure that if I had a tear in my MCL, I wouldn't be able to complete a sentence, let alone an NFL game. The Bears universally defended Cutler, and they say he actually wanted to play (and tried), but the team kept him off the field.

Cutler also has played his entire career with Type 1 diabetes, including one season when it was undiagnosed. He sounds pretty tough to me. His problem was not that he failed to compete against the Packers. It's that he is supposed to compete against our images of players from years past -- even Deion Sanders' revisionist image of himself. It's a battle Jay Cutler could not possibly win. And it is why Green Bay-Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl is so appealing.